I was the shy, chubby kid who was poked and taunted by his elementary school classmates–the Rudolph, who wasn’t allowed in any Reindeer games. The difference with me was the name the kids all chanted, spat back at me with vengeance, was my own–pronounced, “Gay-dicks.” The story goes that when my father emigrated from Hungary in the 1950’s, in order to Anglicize his surname, and make it easier for North Americans, he changed its pronunciation from “Guy-ditch” to “Gay-dicks.” He was still learning English at the time and, evidently, must not have realized the implications of such an alteration.

With the onset of puberty, like a lens shifting slowly, forebodingly, into focus, came the realization that I was, or was at least becoming, as my name implied. If my name had been like flesh I would have peeled or burnt it from my bones, exposed, from within, my true essence and said to everyone, to all my Tormentors, Look, see, I am not the name you call me. But I was. I was everything they named me, and more. My name was marrow; there was nowhere, not anywhere, I could go to escape my insides.

I changed my name, or at least its pronunciation, back to “Guy-ditch” the year I met my former psychiatrist. “How do you say your last name?” he asked, during my initial consultation. “Guy-ditch,” I said. “As in a ‘guy-in-a-ditch.’” Earlier that same year, in 1989, my family had rejected me for being gay, and so I’d moved away from my hometown to “start over.” The doctor said I could, with his assistance, “unlearn” my homosexuality, and revert to my innate heterosexuality. I was twenty-four years old, had been raised Catholic, and believed what he, and the culture at the time, told me.

Medication, used initially to combat insomnia, became the doctor’s weapon against my sex drive. Any light that remained alive in me was switched off: erections were eliminated, fantasy and arousal, eradicated. The canvass to my mind’s imagination was being whitewashed. “Dry mouth, difficulty breathing, heart palpitations, involuntary twitching, constipation, urinary retention, weight gain of over forty pounds: my body became an earthquake that I was trapped inside.

Six years of aversive therapy would elapse before I’d stand naked before my bedroom mirror, staring at a sad and pale reflection of my former self–at my body, bloated from years of over-medication, and into my thirty year old eyes–dark, sunken and unhappy. There would never be a heterosexual in me waiting to emerge; instead, I’d become more like a shell that had had its innards scooped out.

My mother, who escaped a concentration camp during World War II, once told me that she survived thirty-four months in various labor and death camps because her captors never touched the core of who she is. “They might have killed my body, God knows they tried, but they never touched my spirit.” Likewise, six years of therapy to change my sexuality taught me that the only thing that lasts, after losing everything else, is what is real: what can’t be changed.

By the way: after suffering through withdraw of all medication, and recovering from the therapy, I sued my former psychiatrist for treating my homosexuality as a disease.